I am alive and well . . . .

I haven't been able to post in a while due to the limited nature of internet service way up north.  But I have been writing them, and will post them (pix of the Arctic Circle, etc) in a day or two when I get to some place with fiber optics.

All is well; I am in Tok, Alaska.

Days 38 & 39 (June 21 & 22). Dawson

From: Carmacks, YT

To: Dawson City, YT

Miles today: 222, 0

Total miles: 8956

On Sunday I pulled out of Carmacks and drove part of the Klondike Highway (YT 2), which was nominally all paved but had two long stretches of treacherous “construction.” (I put that term in quotes because the miles of gravel road had no construction equipment or workers on them.)  It started out following the Yukon River, then pulls away to the north, and finally rejoins it again near Dawson, where the Klondike River joins the Yukon. The Klondike River is really more of a creek, but it is attractive, and of course has a storied history in terms of gold.

Outside of Dawson I came across a house with an old C-band satellite antenna.  These point right at the satellite, where as the more modern Ka-band antennas tend to be “offset.”  Dawson is at about 64 degrees north.  Check out the elevation angle on the C-band antenna (the big one on the top of the mast) in the photo below; almost pointing at the horizon.  This may be about as far north as geostationary satellite service is practical. 

C-band Antenna (top) pointed just barely above the horizon. 64 degrees north.

Dawson City is a lot like Williamsburg, Virginia.  The core is essentially a preserved city from the past, but here of course it is a 1903 Gold town rather than a 1760 Colonial town. Like Williamsburg, much of the town in now a (Canadian) National Historic Site, and federal dollars are used to support it in various ways.  There are a lot of empty buildings, but you can tell that efforts are being made to preserve them.  The streets have been left unpaved and the sidewalks are planks of wood; you do sort of feel like you are in the period walking around.  Here are a couple of shots from the streets.  The big scar on the hill behind the town is apparently ancient; it is not a remnant of an overeager gold extraction attempt.

Dawson City, Yukon. 

Interestingly, all of these buildings were built in the years shortly after the gold rush; mostly 1900-05.  They were built by a group of people that wanted to encourage foreign (European) investment in large-scale gold dredging operations.  They built the town (after almost everyone had left!)  to make it appear that the town was thriving and that investment dollars would not be wasted.  Amazingly enough, this rouse actually worked!  They got the investments, they created a huge industrial dredging operation, and managed to make money for everyone by extracting a fairly high amount of gold for decades.  The industrial extraction of gold around Dawson ceased 1966.  Perhaps ironically, there are still gold miners in the area; they are once again small individual claim holders who work the areas themselves, albeit with machinery.  I will have to check the TV show “Yukon Gold” when I get home.

Dawson has a permanent population of about 2000 people.  This makes it the second biggest city in the Yukon.  (Whitehorse, the capitol, dwarfs this with 27,000 people, about three-quarters of the total population of the Yukon.  Watson Lake is the only other city with more than 1000 people; it comes in at about 1500.)  But the place was packed when I got here; I didn’t make the connection that the summer solstice would be a good reason to visit.  The first night, the solstice itself, I ended up staying is a lovely old building called “The Bunkhouse.”  It had tiny rooms, with bathrooms and showers down the hall, and it made me feel even more like I was back in 1903.  I loved it.  (But I did move to another, more modern hotel called the El Dorado the second night.) 

My hotels in Dawson.  Left; The Bunkhouse.  Right: The "Eldo," as it is called there.  

Knowing that I had a day off from riding on Monday, and since it was the Solstice, I spent the afternoon and evening going from one bar to another getting into conversations with people.  Some were tourists, who came by RV, car, bus, and many on motorcycles.  People from all over; some Canadians and Americans, but just as many Germans, Poles, and others. I heard French being spoken.  I had a long conversation with the manager of one of the restaurant/saloons, who lived in Winnipeg most of the year but was from Greece and intended to go back there. 

I talked to an interesting couple for a while.  The guy was a self-employed geologist who took samples of people’s claims for a fee and analyzed them.  The woman clued me in on the real story; there wasn’t much gold left here, but Canadian law requires that some effort be made on any given claim every few years or it reverts to the state.  So often they are paid by people who don’t care what they find, they just want them to poke around and charge them so they can hold on to the rights to it. But they both love going out in the field and digging holes (with an auger machine), so it all works out.

Back at the Bunkhouse I talked for a couple of hours with a German motorcyclist only slightly younger than myself who was taking an entire year off to go ride; he was going to South America after Canada and Alaska.  I talked to a number of bikers; it is interesting to hear the stories of deep gravel and slick chip seal while the terror was still fresh, before they evolve into the canonical legends that they must eventually become.  The lessons I am learning are that (1) it’s not just me, some of these roads are really difficult, even for experienced off-road riders; and (2) don’t ride on chip seal when it’s wet.  I have days of chip seal riding ahead of me; it rains less in the morning, so I better get to bed now. 

By the way, here is a view out of my room at The Bunkhouse, Dawson City, at about 2 am on the Solstice. 

View of the sky from Dawson (2.3 degrees south of the Arctic Circle) at the sun's lowest, on the solstice. 

Days 36 & 37 (June 19 & 20). The Campbell Highway

From: Watson Lake, YT

To: Faro, YT, and Carmacks, YT

Miles today: 277, 121

Total miles: 8734

In planning this trip, the Campbell Highway –  all the through roads up here have their own names –  was just a means of getting from Watson Lake to Carmacks (and then Dawson) without going through the city of Whitehorse, which I intend to visit on my way back from Alaska.  But you learn stuff as you go. It turns out the Campbell Highway was built in the 1960’s to connect the town of Carmacks to some new lead and zinc mines near the present town of Faro. Faro, named for the card game, was created at that time to house people associated with the open pit mines; it is down in a river valley and so protected from the wind, and it doesn’t get very much snow (though it is bitterly cold in winter, of course). At one time the town had over 2000 permanent residents.  Most of the ore was hauled out in trucks to the Dawson area and processed there, and this left the road very rough.  But metal prices fell in the 1980’s. This, coupled with some other issues, led to the end of the mines; they closed for good in the early 1990’s.  Faro is still there, although it only has about 400 permanent residents now.  The Campbell highway was extended south to Watson Lake, passing near the town of Ross River on its way. These are the two towns on the 362-mile highway.  The only two.  Both have gas, and one has a (one) motel and a (one) restaurant.  And by restaurant I mean a place where you can buy a meal.  This is remote country. 

The first 40 miles of the Campbell Highway out of Watson Lake were paved.  Then I ran into some pretty brutal construction that went on for ten or fifteen more miles.  I am talking about very soft dirt paths between enormous machines. 20 mph was too fast for this stuff. Finally past it, a bit more pavement, and then alternating stretches of gravel road and chip seal.  If the chip seal is dry, it is preferable; but when wet it really does get sloppy; it is like driving on soft wet clay. If the gravel is not too deep, it is much better when wet.  I did not get rained on much, but there were long stretches of chip seal that were not as fortunate.  I had to keep going; I was past the point of return in my mind.  The next 50 miles or so were an adventure.  After that – perhaps because the road dried out, or perhaps because no one ever came this way to mess up the road surface – things got better and I could move along at a brisker pace.  (In the 100-mile stretch between the end of the construction and about 30 miles from Ross River, I saw a total of two cars going the other way.) 

Eventually I got to the crossroad that Google Maps said to take to Ross River. (One really great thing about Google Maps is that it will still plot your GPS location on the best map it can produce, even when there is no cell service.)  Oddly, I thought, it was unmarked; no sign saying “This Way to Ross River.” I took it anyway, up and down some very steep hills (all unpaved of course), finally reaching the paved streets of Ross River. This, like almost all towns in Yukon, is primarily a Dene community.  I went to the hotel, and – it was boarded up.  I called the number (cell service in Ross River!), and it had been disconnected.  Oh well, Faro was “only” another 45 miles up the road.  Could I get some gas?  Yes I could – out of a giant cylindrical surface tank, with the proprietor (a Dene) living in a small shed behind it.  He gave me one of those “another white man lost in the wilderness” looks, but spoke English to me and sold me the gas. 

Once back on the Campbell Highway, I headed toward Faro – and came across a sign directing me to “Ross River.”  I checked Google Maps, and there was a faint line.  Apparently this was now the “official” route to the town, presumably much smoother and less up and down.  Still unpaved. Even though the sign implied that lodging was available there, I had been there and seen for myself and so kept going.  I had gas; it never gets dark here this time of year; so there was really no rush.  Nonetheless I was able to move the cycle down the constantly winding but smooth and firm road at about 50 mph.  (This road is wide enough for two cars to pass, but it is really a one-lane road, fairly strongly arched in the middle to encourage the rain to run off, so I rode right down the middle most of the time.  I would slow down or move right whenever I came up to a blind curve, but the low level of traffic helped me out.)

Lo and behold, the side road that takes you to Faro from the Campbell Highway was paved!  I cruised along the 6 miles and ended up at – as mentioned above – the only hotel and restaurant for 100 miles or more in either direction.  I unpacked, ate dinner, and had a beer with the bartender named Joe (who also doubled as the motel manager).  He was originally from Thunder Bay, but moved here in 1986, and likes it here.  He told me that the hotel in Ross River closed some time ago, and they closed the bar and liquor store at the same time.  (He said that the Dene were great folks when sober – they would always help you out, even if they carried a perpetual air of resentment that whites were here at all – but when they got drunk, “they put on a different hat” (his expression).  Alcoholism is a problem everywhere, and it is known to be more of a problem in extreme northern latitudes, especially in winter.  Closing the bar and liquor store were apparently an attempt to deal with these problems in Ross River, but the response of many was to drive to Faro to drink.  The unpaved, narrow roads and icy, sub-zero conditions being what they are, the return trips started to become fatal.  According to Joe, Ross River is now thinking about re-opening a liquor store and/or bar there as the lesser of two evils. 

The next day.  The road from Faro to Carmacks was paved the whole way – almost anticlimactic!  Though paved, the road is narrow with no shoulder and only rarely a guardrail.  It was from one such curve around the side of a mountain that I caught my first view of the Yukon River.  The Yukon is the third longest river system in North America, after the Mississippi and the Mackenzie.  It seems to be this beautiful shade of blue-green, and the water moves swiftly.  After a very scenic last few miles (the pictures do not really show the effects), the Campbell terminated by running into YT 2, now known as the Klondike Highway.  A mile or two to the south is the town of Carmacks, again a one-hotel town but right on the Yukon River 

Carmacks got its start in the early 1890’s when coal was discovered nearby. After mining coal for a while – it continued to be mined here for decades – they miners discovered something slightly more lucrative: gold.  This set off the Klondike Gold Rush, and in 1898 and 1899, the peak years, the town boomed.  Once the easy gold was played out – gold continues to be extracted here using industrial methods – the town survived as a stern-wheel paddleboat stop on the Yukon River between Whitehorse and Dawson.  There were several such towns; all the rest faded away with steamship traffic when the Klondike Highway was completed.  Carmacks survived because it was on the road as well as the river.

In the afternoon, I went to a building at the edge of town called the Tage Cho Hudan Interpretive Center.  There were lots of people milling about, both white and First Nation.  It turned out it was “Aboriginal Day” (I was told this by an “aboriginal,” so they seem ok with the term).  It was a big celebration, she said, and everyone was welcome. They certainly made me feel welcome.  I chatted with a number of them about all sorts of things, including the Arctic Ocean.  One woman told me she had only seen it frozen; she had never been there in summer.

I am beginning to appreciate that Canada needs towns like Carmacks, Faro, and Watson Lake. Things happen up here and bases of operations are required to address them.  Many of the people in the restaurant with me tonight wore the uniforms of firefighters.  One of them told me they do sometimes sleep in tents when they are in extra remote regions, but it is much easier to just spend the night in one of these towns, where supplies and equipment can be driven in on tractor trailers.  Their room and board is no doubt paid for by the Canadian government.  The government also apparently helps pay the salaries of some of the people who work in the hotels and restaurants, or at least makes visa situations easier for foreigners who take jobs here.  Tourists like me are therefore especially welcome because we help subsidize the infrastructure. In return, we also get to sleep in hotels and eat in restaurants in the remote Yukon wilderness!

OK, here are a few pictures from the Campbell Highway and Carmacks.  My little camera doesn’t really do justice to pictures where there is bright sky above and dark land below.  Some of the scenery was extraordinarily beautiful, even by wilderness standards.

Young moose on the Campbell Highway

Yukon River

Mountain view

Day 35 (June 19). Into the Mountains

From: Fort Nelson, BC

To: Watson Lake, YT

Miles today: 321

Total miles: 8336

Fort Nelson, British Columbia, is another town that had its start as a fur trading post, this one in 1805.  (It has been relocated several times.)  When the US became concerned during the Second World War that Japan might invade Alaska, Fort Nelson – which by then had a small airport – was used as a base of operations to build what is now called the Alaska Highway.  Today it still an aviation hub for points further north, and a major stop on the highway and thus a tourist stop.  It is also involved in the oil and gas and timber businesses, and is home to about 5000 people.

The choice for the location of the Alaska Highway is clear from topographical maps; the Rocky Mountains take a bit of a break here; the pass at Summit Lake is “only” 4248 feet in elevation. This explains the necessity of my long detour yesterday to reach this road. I rode it all day today, and despite the relatively low elevations I was very impressed with how rugged the terrain is. This was an engineering marvel in 1942, and continues to be one today as it has been converted to a fully-paved all-weather route.  It rained off and on for most of the time today, and it was cold enough that I broke out my jacket liner and heavy gloves. There was some traffic, not just trucks but also tourists like myself, some even on motorcycles. I saw quite a few large animals by the roadsides today, including more bison and these sheep.

Sheep along the Alaska Highway in British Columbia.  (Don't call them goats!  Those are completely different!)

Some of the route cut through Provincial Parks, but most was not.  This was interesting because from time to time what appeared to be “towns” on Googlemaps would pop up, which sold gasoline, some basic food supplies, and usually had a motel with TV and WiFi.  These buildings were very rough looking, like one or a few guys put the whole thing together themselves, but I’m sure they worked exactly as advertised.  I bought gas at two of them; I was never below half a tank. There are no fiber optics here, but satellite TV and satellite internet are available.  My new way of telling these functional outposts from “real towns” is the presence of cell phone service.

I also passed many striking views of mountains and rivers.  Here are a couple of shots.

Left : Muncho Lake.  RIght: Incredibly blue water.  One sign said "Not Potable."

I got to the town of Watson Lake, Yukon (back across the 60^th parallel – no big sign this time) around dinner time. Watson Lake is smaller than Fort Nelson, around 1500 people, but it has two actual attractions that make it a tourist destination in and of itself.  The first is the “Signpost Forest,” basically a park on the main road through town (the Alaska Highway) that has hundreds of wooden posts planted in the ground in rows that have signposts and license plates attached to them by people from all over the world who have passed through. One source of information said that there were more than 75,000 signs posted there.  I think it’s full; I didn’t see any empty posts anywhere. 

The other thing Watson Lake has is the Northern Lights Centre.  This is a state-of-the-art planetarium, or rather theater where you can watch Nova-like movies projected on a dome while sitting in a reclining chair. I was in time for the last show of the evening, and watched a double feature on Black Holes and the Northern Lights – the latter being the main attraction for me, since I am in the land of auroras, but at the time of year when it never gets dark. I was one of six people at this show, the rest being other tourists who were spending the night there.  Did I mention I ate dinner in a Chinese restaurant again?  It was one of about three choices in the town that I saw. 

Watson Lake is also where the unpaved Campbell Highway splits off to the north for Dawson.  This is the route I will take, and I am planning on taking three days to get there.  We’ll see how that goes!

Day 34 (June 17). The Liard Highway

From: Fort Simpson, NWT

To: Fort Nelson, BC

Miles today: 309

Total miles: 8015

I left the lovely Fort Simpson, re-crossed the Makenzie River on the ferry, and took NWT 1 back to where it joins NWT 7, the Liard Highway (“LAY-ard,” named for the river it generally follows).  The Liard Highway runs due south, and in fact it re-crosses the 60^th parallel and ends up in British Columbia (BC).  This is because the Rocky Mountains are directly west of Fort Simpson, and there are no roads west through them, or north around them; so that leaves south.

The Liard Highway is unpaved in the NWT (though paved in BC), and some of the people at the Fort Simpson B&B had ridden it on motorcycles some years ago and warned me that it was not as nice as the Deh Cho highway had been.  In particular, large portions of it were gravel, rather than the “chip-seal” or whatever the reddish brown material I saw so much of yesterday is called.  I was glad they warned me.

The Liard Highway's gravel surface

If the gravel is not too deep, you can follow the channels left by the cars and trucks and do ok. But when it is really deep, more than an inch or two, there is no avoiding riding through it.  Riding on this pea-sized gravel is like riding on ice; the cycle goes all over the place.  I am frankly amazed that the tires didn’t lose their grip entirely and spill the bike on multiple occasions.  It was genuinely scary at times.  In certain parts I slowed to 20 miles per hour or even slower, and had to maintain this for miles.  On the whole, the Liard Highway is unpaved for 160 miles, the majority of it this strange gravel.  It was a long, arduous trip.  I eventually made it to the border with BC.  I have never been so glad to see asphalt in my life. 

Left: No Kidding!  Right: Why not just use ball bearings?

On the bright side, it was sunny all day, the first such day in a long time, which makes for good traveling. I also saw about as many large animals as I did cars and trucks.

Left: Black bear (the nicer type).  Right: A family of bison.

I had about another hundred miles to go to make it to Fort Nelson, British Columbia, where ther was that all-important resource, gasoline.  It seemed to me that the transition from NWT’s taiga to whatever British Columbia has instead was almost instant.  Suddenly there were hills, there were tall broad–leaf trees, and everything just seemed greener and more “lush.”  The people in Fort Nelson claim the winters are still brutal (that magic minus forty degree number was mentioned), but my sense was that I was out of “The North” and back in “Canada.”  At least for a few days.  Next I enter the mountains, and wind my way toward the Yukon.

Day 33 (June 16). The Deh Cho Highway

From: Fort Providence, NWT

To: Fort Simpson, NWT

Miles today: 205

Total miles: 7706

Another day, another overcast morning threatening rain.  I checked out of Fort Providence and retraced my path over the Deh Cho bridge.  Another 10 miles or so and I rejoined NWT Route 1, either the Deh Cho Highway or the Mackenzie Highway depending on who you ask.  Turning west to follow the Deh Cho / Mackenzie River, the pavement continues for several miles and then abruptly ends.  What replaced it is a very nice brownish-red surface that allows for fairly rapid transit, except when wet (when, I am told, it becomes slippery like soap).  The stated speed limit was 90 kilometers per hour (about 55 mph), and I was able to do that easily.  There were a few rough patches, and I slowed down when showers came, but on the whole I was very impressed with how efficiently I was able to move.  The importance of this is only partly due to the fact that the distance between the gas stations at Enterprise and Fort Simpson, where I was going, was about 180 miles. 

The Deh Cho Highway, Northwest Territories, Canada

After about 100 miles, I came to the Sambaa Deh Falls.  This is really a series of rapids where the Trout River, another tributary of the Mackenzie, has narrowed and sped up and cut a narrow channel through the limestone.  The water truly rages by.

The Sambaa Deh Falls on the Trout River

For me, the rapids themselves were only half the fun. The other was that the limestone that the rapids cut through was composed almost entirely of fossils; shells and coral mostly, it looked like, but also some crinoids. Here are a couple of shots to give you the idea.

Fossils in the limestone exposed by the Trout River

I continued on the nicely unpaved highway, though occasional cloudbursts, until Route 1 forked off to the north and Route 7, with the Liard (“LAY-ard) Highway beginning at the other fork. My route led to a ferry which took me across the Mackenzie again, to the nice little town of Fort Simpson.  Here I stayed at a delightful bed and breakfast called the Mackenzie Inn.  That evening and the next morning I chatted up some of the other guests, and had a fine time.  Here is a picture of the Mackenzie River from the second-story deck of the B&B, where I drank coffee and checked my itinerary in the morning.

View of Mackenzie River from my Fort Simpson B&B

Day 32 (June 15). Great Slave Lake and around Fort Providence

From: Hay River, NWT

To: Fort Providence, NWT

Miles today: 215

Total miles: 7501

The town of Hay River is a few miles upstream of the Great Slave Lake, which is the tenth biggest lake in the world, but only the second biggest in the Northwest Territories (after Great Bear Lake, to the north).  It is also the end of the railway lines from southern Canada, so it serves as a staging area for getting resources to all of the smaller communities further north, especially in winter.  When the Great Slave Lake freezes, you can drive trucks over it. Hay River has probably been featured in the TV show “Ice Road Truckers”; I will have to watch for it when I get back.

I drove the five miles or so from the town to the Great Slave Lake itself.  It has a sandy beach, covered with driftwood.  Beautiful.  Unfortunately, no ice floes; I probably missed them by a week or two.  Nonetheless, my blog’s name remains.  This lake is the remnant of another glacial lake called Lake McConnell, not as big as Lake Agassiz but still pretty big.

Left: The Great Slave Lake in NWT, near Hay River.  Right: My boots in the lake. 

From the lake, I retraced my route back through Hay River and then Enterprise, and then turned west on NWT 1.  After a hundred miles or so the road forks, and I took the right fork (NWT 3) north to the town of Fort Providence, another 20 or 30 miles beyond.  This was necessary because there is gasoline at Fort Providence, and none on the other fork until the town of Fort Simpson, another 180 miles beyond the fork.  I will head to Fort Simpson tomorrow, but not without gas.

The Hay River flows into the Great Slave Lake, from the south.  The mighty Mackenzie River flows out of this same lake, to the west.  Most Americans are unfamiliar with the Mackenzie River, but counting its tributaries it is the second-longest river in North America, after the Missouri-Mississippi.  There are no major cities along it, and it empties into the frigid Arctic Ocean, which probably accounts for why it is not better known. 

Still it is a huge river, and in order to get to Fort Providence I would have to cross it.  Until recently, this would have been done with a ferry, but since 2012 it is now crossed by the impressive Deh Cho Bridge. (Deh Cho is the Dene name for the Mackenzie River; it roughly translates as “big river,” like Rio Grande.) Not only is it visually attractive, it was built under arduous conditions, and to survive things like large chunks of ice running into its piers during the ice breakup season.  It provides an all-weather route not only to Fort Providence, which is quite small, but also Yellowknife, which is the capitol of the Northwest Provinces and on the north side of the Great Slave Lake. 

The impressive Deh Cho Bridge over the Mackenzie River

Fort Providence seems more like an outpost to me than a town, but people live there and it is located on one of the places where the Mackenzie River “braids” into multiple smaller routes.  The view from the only hotel in town, the Snowshoe Inn, overlooks the river. 

Location of Fort Simpson on the Upper Mackenzie River, with Great Slave Lake

It being a short day, I decided to take a side trip and continue up NWT 3 toward Yellowknife. This was still several hundred miles away, but just going 35 miles or so gave me the chance to actually enter the great geological feature called the Canadian Shield that I had been skirting for a thousand miles or more. I’ll have more to say about this later. \

The Canadian Shield, being essentially bare bedrock scrubbed clear by glaciers, is dotted with thousands, perhaps millions of small ponds because the rain water has no place to go.  I pulled off NWT 3 onto a dirt side “road” to see one of these lakes close up, but ran into the scene below: what appears to me to be a genuine indigenous housing arrangement.  I took the picture then turned the cycle around so as not to further disturb anyone.

On the edge of the Canadian Shield, about 35 miles north of Fort Providence.

On the way back I stopped at a formal “turnout” where I could see another small lake.  This one seemed to have a small mobile home parked at the end of a short dirt trail leading to the pond.  I made enough noise in trying to photograph the pond to disturb the person staying there, a guy from Quebec named Ghert.  He was searching for morels, a type of mushroom that is very valuable and only grows in forests the year after they have experienced a fire.  I had noticed the burned areas driving out; this is a common event, but of course had been fairly traumatic for the locals last year.  He showed me his finds thus far, which were impressive; he was kind enough to give me a small one as a souvenir.  He is a morel hunter by profession; normally he hunts in his home province of Quebec, but there had not been very many fires there last year. So here he is, like me, visiting the Northwest Territories for the first time.

Morel hunter and his quarry

One final note: the motorcycle trip I took in 1980, from San Francisco to Houston, covered about 7500 miles in five weeks.  I am approximately at that stage now on this trip.  

Day 31 (June 14). Crossing the 60th Parallel

From: High Level, AB

To: Hay River, NWT

Miles today: 194

Total miles: 7286

The cold overcast continues, but I am driving on asphalt so I don’t mind.  I headed north out of High Level on AB 35 this morning, following the Hay River, which flows north into the Great Slave Lake.  Just like Wikipedia said, pretty soon there were no more farms or pastures; just trees.  There continue to be stands of Aspen, but they are growing rarer amongst the evergreens. 

After a couple of hours, I came to the border crossing with the Northwest Territories at the 60^th parallel. There were a number of other people there and at the co-located visitor center, and most seemed to be staying in High Level on business and popped up here on a Sunday so they could say they did it.  Hey, that’s what I would do!

The road changes its number from AB 35 to NWT 1 and continues north.  Not far from the border are two major waterfalls on the Hay River, just a few miles apart.  The upstream (southern) falls are Alexandra falls, and the downstream (northern) is Louise Falls.  People who had been there before said the water level was very low, but they still looked pretty spectacular to me.

Left: Alexandra Falls.  Right: Louise Falls, a few miles downstream.

The interpretive signs in the park gave an interesting account of the Dene First Nations (one doesn’t say “Dene Indians”) who have lived in the region for thousands of years and continue to do so today.  There are five major tribes within this group; here is a map.  As I wrote in an earlier blog, the terms “Slave” and “Slavey” were what their adversaries called them, not what they called themselves.  Thus, if we had to do it again, we might call the big lake to the north the “Great Dene Lake.” 

Map of the five Dene tribes: South Slavey (here), North Slavey, Gwich'in, Dogrib, and Chipewyan

The Dene covered a large range, from northern Alberta to the Great Slave Lake and beyond.  The Hay River was one of their major transportation routes, and carrying their loaded canoes around the twin falls (about 6 kilometers) was a necessary and undoubtedly unpleasant task. What did the Dene think of these falls?  You might think that as a practical people they considered them a spectacular nuisance. But in what seems to be an quasi-fundamental attribute of the human animal, they considered them sacred. From the interpretive signs:

The land is the Dene lifeline here on earth and the land links us to the Creator.  Places where the Creator has placed special features such as these falls remind us of our mortality. At such sacred sites, ceremonies and offerings must be made to the Creator and to the spirits watching over the site.

Dene ask the spirits to cleanse hunters and make them invisible to the animals they hunt.  Because animals are pure and much closer to the Creator in humans, they can sense evil in humans and will avoid evil hunters but offer themselves to those who are pure and good.

A few tens of miles north of the twin falls, at the “outpost” of Enterprise (groceries and gas available!), the Mackenzie Highway (NWT 1) turns west.  I took the other route (NWT 2) and continued north to the town of Hay River, which is on the junction of the river of that name and the Great Slave Lake.  That is where I am now. 

Day 30 (June 13). Northern Alberta / Fort Vermilion

From: Peace River, AB

To: High Level, AB

Miles today: 277

Total miles: 7092

It was drizzling on and off, and pretty cold (by my standards) – 48 degrees – when I got ready to head out.  I wore my rain gear and headed first west on AB 2 and then north on AB 35.  This route continues to follow the ever-narrowing range of Alberta that supports agriculture.  There were indeed farms and pastures the whole way, although they started to become rarer.  (What do they do with horses in the winter?  Do they have heated barns?  Do horses get Cabin Fever?)  In some of the steeper areas, this finally allowed me to get some nice shots of the “Aspen Parkland Biome” that I am now almost out of.  It is quite beautiful, but close inspection shows that it is so thick as to be almost impenetrable. 

Aspen Parkland biome, northern Alberta

In the afternoon the drizzle stopped and blue skies appeared, filled with puffy cumulus clouds. It warmed up considerably. I decided to take the long way to High Level, via some smaller roads to the east through the historic town of Fort Vermilion. It was a terrific drive that included a ferry ride (Fort Vermilion is on the other side of the Peace River).  During this stage the fluffy cumulus were blowing up into thunderstorms all around me.  I took the picture below, and five minutes later I was in a brief but intense downpour that included grain-sized hail. Cool!

Uh oh. Into the storm.

Fort Vermilion is a lovely town of about 700 people that provides services to a very large area.  It is right on the Peace River; one side of Main Street has stores, the other side is the bluff itself.

It is the oldest town in Alberta, way older than Edmonton or Calgary; it was founded in 1788 by the legendary Alexander Mackenzie himself.    He was sponsored by the North West Company, and the goal was to establish a base for fur trading with the indigenous Dunne-za (Beaver), and slightly later the Cree.  This company merged with the rival Hudson Bay Company (HBC) in 1821, and HBC took over control of the outpost / town. 

All of this is in Wikipedia.  What is not, I found out when Ray Toews (pronounced “Taves”) walked across the street from the store he owned to chat with me, was that HBC not only still exists, it pulled out of the town only a couple of years ago!  HBC is actually a huge company, headquartered in Toronto with archives in Winnipeg, and only got out of the fur trade in 1987 (again according to Wiki).  Over time it evolved into the mercantile business, operating general stores and selling supplies of all types to people in the Canadian west.  When I asked Ray who filled the power vacuum when HBC pulled out, he replied “I guess I did; I bought the General Store” (behind him in the picture, and much deeper than it is wide).  He invited me inside and showed me some great old photos, and introduced me to his brother Darwin who was manning the register.  This was definitely the highlight of my day.

The town of Fort Vermilion.  Left: Ray Toews in front of his store.  Right: Same spot, other direction - the Peace River.

From Fort Vermilion I drove west again to the town of High Level.  This is a small town with a huge stretch of motels.  I asked the woman at the desk of my motel what brought so many people to this town; she replied that it is mostly the timber business.  Wiki adds that “High Level marks the northern extent of the Peace River Country, and has one of the northernmost lands suited for agriculture in Canada.”

On a separate note: I was in Edinburgh, Scotland, once.  Its latitude is 55.6 degrees north.  High Level’s latitude is 58.3 degrees north.  So unless I’ve forgotten something, this is my new record, soon to be broken repeatedly.  Why is the Jimmy Buffet’s “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes” running through my head?

Day 29 (June 12). Lesser Slave Lake and Peace River

From: Athabasca, AB

To: Peace River, AB

Miles today: 248

Total miles: 6815

It was chilly when I pulled out this morning, around 50 degrees, but the sky was clear and blue.  I rode AB 2 northwest for about a hundred miles to the town of Slave Lake, which is on Lesser Slave Lake.  (I will get to Great Slave Lake in a couple of days.) On a break at Lake Lawrence (I swear I didn’t know that when I pulled off), I came across this familiar sign amongst the Aspens. “If a bear mauls you, you will be fined!”  (I do agree with the approach; I just find it amusing at a certain level.)

Bear warning sign

The town of Slave Lake was quite a bit bigger than I expected – about 7000 people.  It borders the Lesser Slave Lake Provincial Park, and it was there I went to see this body of water.   It was really striking when I came over the rise and saw it. Waves!

Lesser Slave Lake

The blue skies disappeared pretty fast, and rain was clearly on the way.  I stopped for a quick lunch at the town of High Prairie (this name, like “Greenland,” is a bit misleading – this is not prairie any more), then bundled up and headed for the town of Peace River another hundred miles up the road.  It rained most of the way, a cold steady rain but no lightening.  I broke out my cold weather gloves, but even so, I want to sing the praises of whoever invented heated motorcycle grips.

The town of Peace River is, as one might expect, along the river of the same name.  The entrance to the area is fairly dramatic, because the land all around is flat and then there is this enormous river valley carved a thousand feet down into it.  The town is at the bottom of the river valley. It looks like it is surrounded by hills, but these are all artifacts of the river. This is another town of about 7000 people, with a Chinese restaurant (where I ate dinner) owned by real Chinese. 

Main Street in the town of Peace River, looking toward the river

There are lots of other groups here as well, including those calling themselves “First Nations.”  This is a generic term for all indigenous peoples other than Inuit (the term “Eskimo” is considered pejorative) and  Metis (a group descended from an early mixing of aboriginal and European/African peoples who now mostly marry only each other and live in fairly well-defined regions).  The term “First Nations” can be thought of as synonymous with “Indians,” except the former was self-selected and not as irritating.

One of the most important First Nations groups in this area are the Dunne-za, apparently a subset of the Dene that I will be seeing lots more of on this trip.  The Dunne-za / Dene speak one of the Athapaskan family of languages, and were sometimes referred to by their Cree (Algonquian – speaking) rivals as Slaves (no relation to our use of this word, but it is the source of the Lesser and Great lakes of these names).  These two groups came into conflict when the Crees got guns from fur traders in the late 1600s and pushed the Dunne-za west.  Later these groups, each supported by a different British fur trading company, fought each other repeatedly and bitterly.  After smallpox hit the Cree hard, the two groups settled on the big river through these parts as the permanent boundary between their regions of hunting and influence, so they called it the Peace River (that is the English translation, of course). 

The Peace River itself, from the levee at the edge of town

Today I saw logging trucks on the roads for the first time in quite a while.  I also saw my first oil fields, as I am now on the edge of the famous oil sands of Alberta.  

Day 28 (June 11). North of Edmonton

From: Edmonton, AB

To: Athabasca, AB

Miles today: 108

Total miles: 6567

Four weeks on the road.  Now the adventurous part begins.

My new front tire, suitable for unpaved roads. "It just got real."

I continued my stay in Edmonton while Scona Cycle continued to tune up my bike, including putting on new tires that are a compromise between on-road and off-road.  For those who follow such things, they are Continental TKC 80 “Off Road Enduro” tires, which were recommended on one of the Internet sites that focuses on this sort of thing.  Well, now that the tires are physically on the cycle, I guess there is no turning back.  Once again, I move toward the unknown. 

The bike was ready at about 1 pm, and I went over to get it about an hour later. After signing everything and settling accounts, I went to climb on and drive away.  There was an old man, in his eighties, sitting out there waiting for me.  He wanted to chat about riding. He introduced himself as “Rudi,” and for someone with as poor a memory as I have, something pinged.  “Are you the owner?” I asked.  “Yes,” he responded – he is actually the founder – and then jumped back to discussing my machine. I had recognized his name from the business card the shop had given me; I don’t know why.  He was a big fan of the Honda NT700, which was never sold in Canada (and only in the US for two years), and knew all about it. He is still mad at Honda for this, and he is a Honda dealer.  When he saw it in the shop and then saw the tires that were being put on, he knew the owner must be “going north” and waited around to meet me. 

His name is Rudi Zacsko, and he has had one of the most interesting lives of anyone I have ever met.  He escaped Hungary as a young man in 1956, after the failed uprising against the Soviet Union. He has been involved with motorcycles all his life, and has ridden practically everywhere there is to ride.  He has done the ride I am about to do three times, I believe he said, and he has driven through Mexico, Central America, and South America, mostly off-road.  Multiple times. He said he was 87 years old now and still rides; he was in Arizona last winter. He apparently wanted to meet me because I did not drive a Gold Wing or some other super heavy bike, but the modest 700 cc NT, similar to the machines that he has ridden all his life.  He showed me some great maps and pictures taken from his long career; on the way out, I could see some of the guys who worked in the shop smiling at me.  It was a very cool experience.

The legendary Rudi Zacsko Sr., still riding.

Because of Edmonton’s sprawl, I decided to use the rest of the afternoon to get out of town so that I wouldn’t have to fight rush hour in the morning.  This proved to be a good idea; even at 3:30 the traffic was brutal, and the traffic lights even along the major roads went on for miles.  I finally broke out on AB 2, and took it the hundred or so miles to the town of Athabasca, which is on the river of the same name. A hundred miles is not a lot, but there was an important change.  As I mentioned earlier, the branches of the Saskatchewan River that flow through Edmonton and Saskatoon eventually dump their water into Hudson Bay and then the North Atlantic. The Athabasca River is a tributary to the Mackenzie, which empties into the Arctic.  I have changed watersheds.

I am also out of the prairie and almost into taiga, sometimes called boreal forest.  Taiga (pronounced like “tiger” only with the “r” replaced by “ah”) is actually one of the largest biomes on earth, in terms of square miles.  There are a few pieces of it in the US – in northern Minnesota, Michigan, New York, and Maine mostly.  Canada and Russia are dominated by it.  Taiga is composed of conifers, mostly pines, spruces, and larches. Despite its vast geographic extent, the biodiversity is quite low; you can go two thousand miles and see the same few species of tree, mammal, bird, and occasional insect.   As you might expect, the chief characteristic of this biome is the long, cold winter.  Also important is the extreme difference in average temperatures between winter and summer, which is in turn due in large part to the vastly different number of hours of sunlight between those seasons. I will be in taiga for a long time, breaking out into tundra only when I am north of the Arctic Circle. 

Left: regions of taiga.  Right: my current location (Athabasca), with the border between prairie and taiga visible from space.

Days 26-27 (June 9-10). Saskatoon and Edmonton

From: Saskatoon, SK

To: Edmonton, AB

Miles today: 343, 0

Total miles: 6459

Saskatoon’s economy is based mostly on farming, but also somewhat on potash mining (that is, potassium, used in fertilizer and hundreds of other products), and oil.  It is located on the South Saskatchewan River, and is wooded.  It is a nice little city of about 300 thousand.  The Saskatchewan license plates read “Land of Living Skies,” and the photo on the left from one of the many bridges illustrates this.

Saskatoon skyline from one of the bridges over the South Saskatchewan River

Edmonton is another story entirely.  It is a Big City, with well over a million people in the metropolitan area. It has the sprawl and traffic jams that come along with it, along with a terrific skyline and an economy that is clearly thriving.  It is on the North Saskatchewan River, which meets up with the South east of Saskatoon.  When joined, these rivers form “the Saskatchewan River,” which continues flowing east to the remnant lakes including Lake Winnipeg, and from there into Hudson Bay and then the North Atlantic.  Here is a shot I took of the Edmonton skyline I took over the North Saskatchewan. 

The Edmonton Skyline from across the North Saskatchewan River

Edmonton is an industrial city, based heavily on petroleum.  On arriving in Edmonton from the east, I drove through what must have been ten miles of refineries and storage tanks.  It was as if Bay City, Texas, were a neighborhood in Houston.  To its credit, I smelled nothing, and during the rest of my stay I was oblivious to this section of town.  This is where I am having my motorcycle readied for the Great Northern Leg of my adventure, mostly by replacing the tires with some that are (hopefully) more suited to the non-paved roads I will soon encounter.  I took the opportunity to rent a car and drive around a bit.  Here are some photos from downtown Edmonton.

Scenes from downtown Edmonton.  Left; central plaza.  Right: Alberta Art Museum.

A taxi driver I talked to said that the winters in Edmonton last about two months longer than those in Toronto (he has lived in both).  Despite this, Wikipedia says that the winters in Edmonton are milder than Saskatoon and Winnipeg, both of which are further south.  The taxi driver added that what really surprised him were the temperature changes; he talked about temperatures of 20 degrees (Celsius) during the day, and dropping to -20 at night.  I also mention in passing that as I write this at 10 pm local time, on June 10, that it is still light outside. 

Geologically and ecologically, the swath of land between Saskatoon and Edmonton is a transitional region between prairie (to the south) and taiga (to the north) called Aspen Parkland.  It was hard to tell on the drive between the two, because farmland carved out of Aspen Parkland and farmland carved out of Prairie look pretty similar.  I have noticed that most of the trees I have seen lately, outside of the cities, are either Aspen or evergreen.